THE BOOK CLUB #2
Gerri allowed herself a moment of professional satisfaction.
Brief, controlled, and not at all humble.
“They are extraordinary. I don’t match ordinary people, Emberlaine.
Ordinary people figure it out on their own.
The people who come to me are exceptional in ways that make them exceptionally difficult to pair. Your son—”
“Is the most difficult man alive.”
“I was going to say exceptional. But, yes. That too.”
Emberlaine almost smiled. The architecture advanced significantly. “Do you have someone in mind? Or do you intend to begin a search?”
Gerri opened her mouth to answer—and the terrace doors swept open again.
Marisol Nores entered a room the way tropical weather entered a temperate zone: with warmth that rearranged the emotional climate before anyone registered the shift.
She was fifty-eight, exquisitely preserved, and dressed in ivory and gold that complemented her Filipina coloring with the kind of effortless harmony that required enormous effort to achieve.
Her dark hair was swept into an elegant twist. Her jewelry was restrained, expensive, and chosen with the deliberateness of someone who understood that true wealth whispered.
She also carried a gift bag from a patisserie in Quezon City that she set on the nearest table with casual authority—she had been bringing food to gatherings since before any of her children could walk.
“Gerri.” Marisol pressed cheeks with her in the European style—left, right, the ghost of contact that communicated affection without disturbing lipstick. “The terrace is stunning. The cookies are unreal. Is that a dragon with toe beans?”
“Individual toe beans. I’m not an amateur.”
“You are a visionary.” Marisol surveyed the room with the quick, warm assessment of a socialite who had cataloged every face at every event she’d attended for three decades. “This is the largest gathering yet.”
“And growing. Apparently saving people’s children from romantic despair creates loyalty. Who knew?” Gerri touched her arm. “Marisol, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
She steered her toward the glass nook where Emberlaine stood with her champagne, silhouetted against the Midtown skyline like a figure from a very old and very expensive painting.
Marisol’s step faltered for half a second—the instinctive hesitation of a human body registering the proximity of an apex predator—before her social training overrode biology and carried her forward.
“Marisol Nores, may I introduce Lady Emberlaine Silverscale. Emberlaine, this is Marisol Nores. We serve on the Asian American Arts Foundation board together. She is one of the most formidable women I know, and I know every formidable woman in this city.”
Emberlaine extended her hand. Marisol took it. The handshake lasted exactly two seconds—long enough for Emberlaine to register Marisol’s warmth and steady grip, long enough for Marisol to register that Emberlaine’s skin ran several degrees above normal human temperature.
“Silverscale.” Marisol’s dark eyes sharpened with recognition. “As in Silverscale Entertainment? The Villains Only Convention?”
“As in my son’s empire, yes.”
“My daughter is directing it this year.” Pride and maternal anxiety braided through the words. “The New York convention. She starts pre-production next month.”
Gerri said nothing. She sipped her champagne and watched the two women with the focused attention of a conductor waiting for the first note of the overture.
Emberlaine tilted her head—a gesture so precisely controlled it might have been rehearsed over lifetimes. “Your daughter. The convention director. Alani Nores.”
“You know her name.”
“I know every person my son employs at the executive level. Your daughter’s reputation precedes her—three consecutive attendance records broken, a complete overhaul of immersive programming standards, and a cosplay competition she won under an alias at the very convention she was directing in Chicago last year.
” The silver eyes glinted. “I found that last detail… encouraging.”
Marisol blinked. Recovered. Smiled with the fierce warmth of a mother who had spent thirty years watching the world underestimate her daughter. “She can’t resist competing. I’ve told her it’s a conflict of interest. She tells me the conflict makes it more interesting.”
“She sounds,” Emberlaine said carefully, “like someone who does not dim herself for the comfort of others.”
The air between them shifted. Gerri tasted it—the subtle electric charge that preceded every successful match she’d ever engineered.
Two mothers, both brilliant, both fiercely protective, both haunted by the same fundamental fear: that their extraordinary child would go unloved because the world kept demanding they be less than they were.
Marisol set down her champagne. “Ms. Silverscale—”
“Lady. But Emberlaine is fine.”
“Emberlaine.” Marisol folded her hands in front of her—a negotiation posture Gerri recognized from a dozen board meetings.
“My daughter is thirty years old. She is brilliant, creative, successful, and chronically single because every man she has dated in the last decade has eventually asked her to be less. Less enthusiastic. Less nerdy. Less vibrant. Less herself.”
Her voice remained steady, but a raw edge flickered beneath the poise.
“I watch her come home from dates that started with promise and ended with some man suggesting she tone it down, and I want to—” She stopped.
Breathed. Smiled the gracious-steel smile.
“Well. I want to introduce them to her father’s lawyers.
But that’s neither productive nor legal in most jurisdictions. ”
Emberlaine’s expression did not change. But her eyes—those ancient, shifting silver eyes—softened by a fraction that only another mother would have caught.
“My son,” Emberlaine said, “is seven hundred and ninety years old. He has not formed a meaningful personal attachment in centuries. He builds empires, collects stories, and hoards the loneliness like a dragon hoards treasure—holding it close, examining it from every angle, and refusing to let anyone take it from him.” She turned the champagne flute in her fingers.
“He does not need someone who will dim herself. He needs someone whose light is so relentless that his defenses become irrelevant.”
Marisol stared at her. Emberlaine stared back. Two mothers, separated by over a thousand years of lived experience, finding common ground on the universal truth that their children were making them insane.
“Alani,” Marisol said quietly, “would burn through any defense on Earth if the prize on the other side interested her enough.”
“My son has been building his defenses for eight centuries.”
“My daughter once talked her way into a sold-out premiere by cosplaying as the film’s villain and convincing the security team she was a promotional hire. She was seventeen.” Marisol’s chin lifted. “Your son’s eight centuries are adorable.”
Emberlaine looked at Gerri.
Gerri was already smiling.
The evening deepened. The city below shifted from golden hour to electric blue, the skyline sharpening into a grid of lit windows and ambition. Gerri made her rounds.
She refilled champagne glasses personally—not because the servers couldn’t manage it, but because a woman handing you a drink had two free seconds to whisper intelligence.
She deposited Ozara Stone next to Colette Keiser so that the wolf-mother and the bear-mother could continue their ongoing competition over whose grandchildren would arrive first, a rivalry that Gerri found endlessly entertaining and strategically useful for maintaining group cohesion.
She complimented Astrid Sterling’s new earrings—Bulgari, recent, a gift from her son and daughter-in-law—and listened to a three-minute update on the lion pride’s latest charitable initiative that she filed away for future reference.
She accepted a mini empanada from the passing tray and ate it while watching Marisol and Emberlaine at the glass railing, their heads inclined toward each other with the conspiratorial closeness of women who had discovered a shared obsession.
There it is.
The alchemy. The invisible thread she’d learned to see over decades of practice—the moment when two separate stories began angling toward a single narrative.
Marisol Nores, who loved her daughter with the fierce, frustrated tenderness of a woman who knew the world wasn’t big enough for Alani and kept watching it try to shrink her.
Emberlaine Silverscale, who loved her son with the patient, geological devotion of a being who had watched centuries pass and could not bear to watch another one empty.
They hadn’t planned this. They hadn’t coordinated their attendance. Marisol had RSVP’d because Gerri had casually mentioned the gathering at their last board meeting. Emberlaine had responded to a hand-calligraphed invitation delivered by courier to a London address that predated the postal system.
Two mothers. Two impossible children. One evening.